Schliesser
notes several respects in which the scientific revolution was more complicated
than Nagel’s critics seem to imply. In
particular, it was not an immediate and complete transition to what Bernard Williams has called the
“Absolute Conception of Reality” -- a world of colorless, odorless,
teleology-free material elements whose behavior can be exhaustively described
in terms of mathematical laws -- and it was not a transition from a completely failed Aristotelian
science that was a mere systematization of common sense devoid of predictive
successes. In fact, Schliesser says,
Aristotelian science, whatever its failings, was “a majestic achievement” and
in fact “it is an open question if teleology has ever been fully eliminated from
physics (and if so, when).” (I hasten to
add that while these quotes might make Schliesser sound like… well, like me… he is certainly not putting forward the sort of neo-Aristotelian-Scholastic
position I would defend. He just wants
to make it clear that the conceptual territory is more complicated than the
standard Heroic Age of Science narrative would have it. Read the
whole post to get a sense of his views.)

Now if I
understand Schliesser correctly, he thinks that Leiter, Weisberg, and Noë more
or less identify the “Absolute Conception of Reality” with science itself. They differ in that Leiter and Weisberg
essentially think that the Absolute Conception (and thus science) probably
captures more or less all of reality (or at least that Nagel hasn’t shown
otherwise); whereas Noë thinks that the Absolute Conception (and thus science)
is inadequate as its stands and needs to be supplemented. Schliesser, by contrast, thinks it is a
mistake to identify science with the Absolute Conception in the first
place. The Absolute Conception is rather
something that has gotten tacked on to modern science but could be separated
from it, whatever we might want to replace it with. (Again, if I understand Schliesser’s position
correctly -- I welcome correction if I have misinterpreted him.)

My own view,
of course, is that the so-called Absolute Conception most certainly does not
capture all of reality. The question is
whether it is Noë’s characterization of the Absolute Conception’s relation to
science, or Schliesser’s, that is correct.
I am not sure that the dispute is more than terminological, and the
reason is that it seems to me that terms like “science” and even “physics” are
not really as well-defined as is often supposed. Certainly they are contested terms, as I
think the dispute at hand itself indicates.
Schliesser writes, vis-à-vis teleology and physics:

Leibniz promoted least action
principles, and variational principles have remained popular through Hertz,
Hamilton, into quantum mechanics. This is not the place to decide whether such
principles must be interpreted
as teleological (and in what sense 'teleological' has been transformed along
the way); all I claim is that they have
been understood as teleological by prominent philosophers-scientists.

I would
imagine that some readers will say “That’s true, so maybe physics could in
principle include teleology (whether or not it should),” while others would say
“That’s true, but since physics can’t include teleology, what you’re talking
about are really scientists who were doing metaphysics (whether or not that
metaphysics is correct).”

Similarly,
when a J.
Scott Turner, Marjorie
Grene, or André Ariew suggests that
immanent teleology (i.e. the Aristotelian kind rather than the Paleyan kind) might
have a legitimate place in our understanding of developmental processes in
biology (even if it is not necessary to understanding adaptation), some readers
might say “OK, maybe a science like biology can affirm teleology after all,” whereas
others might say “Biology is a science, and thus cannot affirm teleology; so,
even if there is reason to attribute teleology to developmental processes, that
would be a metaphysical point rather than a scientific point.”

Some Aristotelian-Thomistic
thinkers of the early to mid twentieth century argued that whereas physics characterizes
nature in an essentially mathematical way, Aristotelian notions like formal and
final causality, act and potency, and the like are still essential to an
adequate philosophy of nature, which
addresses deeper questions about the nature of the material world than physics
addresses. (I have put things this way
myself many times, such as here.) On the other hand, NancyCartwright says that though “the empiricists of the scientific revolution
wanted to oust Aristotle
entirely from the new learning,”
in fact “they did no such thing” and
physics itself does indeed reveal the Aristotelian “inner natures” of
things. Similarly, the physicist
Stephen Barr has
objected to the way some Thomists characterize physics, and insists that
physics really does uncover the “intelligible structures” of things (and thus,
in a sense, their “forms”).

Who is
right? In all these cases I think it
depends on whether you think modern physics and modern science more generally
are defined by the early moderns’
move away from immanent, Aristotelian formal and final causes. If you think that something like immanent
formal and final causes are real but allow (at least for the sake of argument)
that physics and science are non-teleological, then you will say that physics
and science more generally need to be supplemented by an Aristotelian
philosophy of nature. If you think that
something like immanent formal and final causes are real and do not think the anti-Aristotelian move of
the early moderns has any essential connection with the practice of modern
science as such, then you will be happy to allow that formal and final causes
are properly part of physics and science more generally. But it does not seem to me that there is much
of a substantive dispute here. Or at least, both sides essentially agree
about what exists in nature itself;
they just disagree over which parts of the study
of nature belong to the sphere of physics and which to the sphere of
philosophy. (I’ve talked with Steve Barr
about this subject at length, and I am convinced that the differences between
him and the Thomists he is criticizing over how to interpret physics are largely
verbal.)

Schliesser
himself, I realize, is not necessarily committed to all or even any of the
Aristotelian apparatus, and does not have a dog in any intra-Aristotelian fight
over how modern physics is related to notions like teleology, formal causes,
etc. As far as I can tell he is just
making the point that Williams’ “Absolute Conception” should not be confused
with science itself, whether or not one wants to reject the Absolute
Conception, and (if one does reject it) whether one wants to replace it with
some kind of neo-Aristotelian position or with something else entirely.

But I think something
like the point I’ve been making applies to the relationship between Schliesser’s
position and Noë’s, and Nagel’s position and mine too for that matter. All of us essentially agree that the Absolute
Conception is not something that science has shown to be a complete account of
reality. Where we differ is (perhaps) in
our degree of confidence in the judgment that the Absolute Conception is
incomplete, in our views about whether the Absolute Conception should be identified with science itself, and in
our views about what the Absolute Conception should be supplemented with. Those are significant disagreements, but the
point of agreement is not insignificant.

(Chomsky
once remarked that “as soon as we come to understand anything, we call it
‘physical.’” Something similar might be
said about the word “science.” Take
Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature, metaphysics, and natural
theology. These have been worked out in
systematic detail -- the Neo-Scholastic manualist tradition essentially
presented them the way modern physics, chemistry, or biology would be presented
in a textbook, as a worked out body of thought -- and we old-fashioned Thomist
types regard them as about as secure and clearly right at least in outline as
anything else we know. Hence we are
happy to regard them as “sciences,” in the Aristotelian sense. Naturalists, of course, would reject all of
that. But many of them are so confident
of the truth of an essentially materialist metaphysics and a broadly empiricist
epistemology that they more or less regard those
positions as “scientific.”)

Before
moving on I want briefly to remark on something Schliesser says about Aristotle. He writes:

I am no Aristotle scholar. But I read
Aristotle as a relentless naturalist with an unmoved mover uninterested in
the goings on in the world. (I am open to correction from more learned
readers.) His final causes are rooted in the worldly natures of worldly things.
Such natures and material stuff are constraints on any teleological
explanation; I bet that even the most hard-nosed Darwinian would be impressed
by the extraordinary detail and empirical richness of Aristole's biological writings.

End
quote. A commenter took Schliesser to
task for these remarks, which led to an
exchange in his combox (in which my work was cited). I certainly wouldn’t call Aristotle a
“naturalist,” though in fairness to Schliesser it should be noted both that the
term “naturalism” is itself somewhat elastic, and that twentieth-century Catholic
critics of Neo-Scholasticism such as Henri de Lubac liked to suggest that
Aristotelianism tended toward “naturalism.”

But
Aristotle was clearly not a “naturalist” in the contemporary sense. The most obvious reasons are that he affirmed
the existence of an Unmoved Mover who is pure actuality (and thus immaterial),
and affirmed also the immateriality of the intellect (even if the precise
interpretation of Aristotle’s views on this subject has of course been controversial
for centuries). These were by no means
incidental features of his philosophy, any more than atheism and materialism are
incidental features of contemporary naturalism.
Moreover, while Nagel and others might want to marry something like
Aristotle’s immanent teleology to naturalism, that will be a shotgun wedding if
it happens at all. For however we want
to define “science,” naturalism, at
least as that has been understood in contemporary academic philosophy since
Quine, is surely wedded to the “Absolute Conception” or something like it, and
the Absolute Conception is inherently anti-Aristotelian. (That, I might note, is why I alluded to
Cartwright in an earlier post as someone whose work -- neo-Aristotelian as it
is -- poses a challenge to naturalism.
New APPS contributor Mark Lance took
issue with this, but I was of course not claiming that Cartwright is in
general agreement with more self-consciously anti-naturalist philosophers like
analytical Thomists.)

Schliesser
and his commenter also discuss some other issues, such as whether God, as
Aristotle understands him, is an efficient cause as well as a final cause, and
whether the existence of immanent final causes must ultimately be explained in
terms of God’s directing natural substances toward their ends. Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers would
of course answer in the affirmative in both cases -- quite rightly, in
my view -- but I agree that whether Aristotle
himself would have gone in these directions is controversial, to say the
least.

PSR and teleology

In a
later post, Schliesser discusses the role the Principle of Sufficient
Reason (PSR) plays in Nagel’s book. He
begins as follows:

Analytical philosophy has made great
progress over the last century. But its original, necessary biases did some
harm, too. In particular, detailed working knowledge of the history of
philosophy and metaphysics was banished for several generations. While
metaphysics is thriving again, we still lack (despite the brilliance of David
Lewis' modular approach) complete systems of thought that can rival in depth
and interlocking breadth the past masters (say, Suarez, Leibniz, etc.). The
damage has also been more narrow. For example, one of the most obvious
so-called ‘Kuhn Losses’ is our relative ignorance of the nature and
implications of the Principle
of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This is no surprise because analytical
philosophy was founded in the act of rejecting PSR. Our forefathers’ attempt to
balance between common sense and the truths of science meant -- as science and
the PSR parted ways -- the willing submission to brute, ultimate facts…

End
quote. I essentially agree with this,
and warmly (though I imagine Schliesser and I would disagree about the nature
and extent of the “progress” analytic philosophy has purportedly made, and
about how “necessary” its original biases were). Schliesser also says that “unlike some of my
Darwinian friends I think we should keep philosophy a welcoming place to folk
that want to explore possible future sciences in opposition to present science.”

However,
Schliesser goes on to criticize Nagel for going beyond what PSR would allow in
appealing to teleology. This is not because
of any hostility to teleology as such on Schliesser’s part, but rather because
he thinks Nagel simply does not do enough to show how the specific sort of
teleological principles he considers meet the demands of “any PSR worth having.” Because Nagel’s views are so inchoate,
Schliesser certainly can make that case; although, precisely because Nagel’s
views are so inchoate, there may be a way to reconstruct them so that
Schliesser’s criticisms are rebutted.

I’m not
inclined to try to defend Nagel on this score, however, because I do not think
PSR -- or more precisely, PSR as it is understood in rationalist philosophy --
has the importance Nagel, Schliesser, and many others (whether pro-PSR or
anti-PSR) think it does. Here we come to
one of the many crucial differences between classical (and especially
Aristotelian-Scholastic) philosophy on the one hand, and the varieties of modern
philosophy on the other, on which I so often harp. (What follows is in the way of a digression
of sorts, but one that is relevant to the issues Schliesser raises.)

For the
Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, the work writers like Leibniz or Spinoza
would do with PSR is properly done instead by what is sometimes called the principle of causality. That principle can be formulated in different
ways, but the most fundamental formulation states that no potency can actualize itself, but must be actualized by something
already actual.

Notice a few
things about the relationship between this principle and PSR. First, the principle of causality is grounded
in the theory of act and potency, which is the foundation of Aristotelian
philosophy of nature (and indeed of the entire Aristotelian-Scholastic system),
first developed in response to Parmenides’ and Zeno’s denial of the reality of
change and multiplicity. The
Aristotelian argues that change and multiplicity can be real features of the
world only if potency -- that which is neither fully actual nor sheer non-being
or nothingness, but an irreducible middle ground -- is also a real feature of
the world. By contrast, PSR, as it is
understood in the modern rationalist tradition, was developed precisely in an
intellectual context which had essentially jettisoned the theory of act and
potency. (To be sure, the notions of act
and potency are not entirely absent in the early moderns, but they have nothing
like the centrality they have in Scholasticism, they are not considered
essential to understanding the natural world, and they would soon disappear
almost entirely within “mainstream” Western philosophy -- or at least they did
until contemporary analytic metaphysicians started to take seriously the idea
that there is a distinction to be drawn between “categorical” and
“dispositional” properties.) PSR lacks
the wider theoretical context of the Scholastic principle of causality,
standing alone as a supposed “law of thought.”

This brings
us to a second point, which is that whereas the principle of causality is a
principle of metaphysics and philosophy of nature, PSR is essentially a
logical-cum-epistemological principle.
The principle of causality purports to tell us something about the world itself. PSR purports to tell us something about how we
have to understand the world, or think about it, or make it intelligible to us. That opens it to Humean, Kantian, and
naturalist objections to the effect that there is no reason to think that
objective reality has to correspond to our demands for intelligibility. Like the frantic Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain
America) in the comic book panel above, we crave explanations. But perhaps (so this sort of objection goes,
and to shift pop culture references) we are in the epistemic position of Inigo
Montoya, and had better
get used to disappointment.

Which brings
us to the third point, which is that if the Scholastic position is correct,
then (a version of) PSR is itself grounded in the principle of causality and
the theory of act and potency more generally.
It is because any potency can be actualized only by what is already
actual that the actualization of any potency -- and thus the coming into
existence of a thing or the occurrence of any event -- will have an
explanation. It is because God is pure
actuality and thus without any potency that could be actualized in the first
place that he does not have (indeed could not have had) a cause, and is
“self-explanatory” in a way nothing else could be. Etc.
The theory of causality grounds the theory of explanation, rather than
the other way around. While Humean,
Kantian, and naturalist objections to PSR may have force against rationalist
versions of the principle -- which, again, present it as if it were just an a
priori principle or something that merely reflects the structure of cognition --
they misfire against the Scholastic approach to PSR, which grounds it in
something objective and metaphysically deeper.

I would say
that this approach is invisible to most modern philosophers because they are
used to looking at the issue in terms of the range of options that have come
down to us from the rationalists, empiricists, and Kant -- a range of options
the Scholastic regards as too limited.
For the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, our concepts are all grounded
in experience but nevertheless outstrip experience. I form the concept of a triangle or a tree
only because I have experienced these things -- the concepts are not innate or
a priori -- but the concept triangularity
or treeness nevertheless cannot in
principle be identified with a sensation, mental image, computational symbol
structure, neural structure or any other “inner representation” of the sort the
empiricist or naturalist would identify it with. (See my article “Kripke, Ross, and the
Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” forthcoming in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, for a detailed defense
of the claim that a concept “cannot in principle” be identified with any such
thing. The reasons have to do with the
fact that concepts and the thoughts they enter into inherently have a universal reference that no sensation,
mental image, computational symbol structure, neural structure, or the like can
have, and a determinacy of content
that no sensation, mental image, computational symbol structure, neural
structure, or the like can have. I’ve
addressed this issue before, but the new paper sets the argument out at greater
length than I have previously and responds to every objection I know of.)

Now what we
grasp in grasping a concept is, for the Aristotelian, the form, nature, or
essence of the thing the concept is a concept of. The same form, nature, or essence that makes
the tree a tree makes my cognition of a tree a cognition of a tree; it’s just
that in the latter case the form exists “intentionally” rather than in
mind-independent reality. It is
abstracted by the mind from the concrete, mind-independent tree and considered
by itself. And when I grasp necessary
truths about a tree, the necessity I find in thought (conceptual necessity) is merely
an echo or reflection of the necessity that already exists in a
mind-independent way in the tree itself given its essence. But I know the tree only via experience, from
which experience I’ve abstracted the form or essence. In that sense, knowledge of the essences of
things and thus of necessary truths about them is grounded in experience rather
than a priori. It isn’t mere knowledge
of concepts, whether innate or intuited
as residing in some Platonic third realm.
It is knowledge of the mind-independent and experienced things themselves, through the abstracted concepts.

Obviously
all this raises lots of questions, but the point is to indicate how radically
different the Aristotelian-Scholastic approach to these issues is from the
usual modern approaches. The early
moderns who rejected the Aristotelian account of concept formation replaced it
with either a rationalist or empiricist account, both of which essentially take
half of the Aristotelian position while lopping off the other half. The rationalist agrees with the Aristotelian
that the necessity of conceptual truths reflects the necessity of
mind-independent reality, but denies that these truths are in any way grounded
in experience. They thus come to seem to
the critic of rationalism to float free of any objective epistemological
foundation. The empiricist agrees with
the Aristotelian that these truths are grounded in experience (at least insofar
as every idea must be traceable to some sensation), but denies that they
reflect any mind-independent necessity. The
necessity instead reflects nothing more than our habits of thought, or
linguistic practices, or our cultural or biological inheritance, or something
equally anticlimactic. Kant, rather than
rejecting the rationalist and empiricist extremes and returning to the
Aristotelian middle ground position -- mind-independent necessity, knowledge of
which is grounded in experience -- for all practical purposes embraced the
anti-Aristotelian aspects of both rationalism and empiricism and chucked out
the remaining Aristotelian bits of each: Conceptual truths reflect no
mind-independent necessity (at least as far as we can possibly know) and are
not grounded in experience but are a priori.

Against this
rationalist/empiricist/Kantian background, it is only natural that if something
isn’t empirical science, it will seem that the only thing left for it to be is
“conceptual analysis” -- and “therefore” to be of dubious objectivity
(reflecting mere biologically-based but still contingent predilections at best,
and mere prejudice at worst). And it is
no surprise that when PSR is dismissed as dubious conceptual analysis, the
“brute, ultimate facts” of empirical science (as Schliesser refers to them)
will come to seem the only possible terminus of explanation.

This is also
one reason contemporary philosophers often so badly misunderstand the arguments
of Thomists and others whose thinking is grounded in the classical and medieval
traditions. Such philosophers will
assume, for example, that Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence must either be
dubious “god of the gaps” style empirical hypotheses or exercises in
rationalist metaphysics. They tend
therefore to assimilate Aquinas’s Fifth Way to Paley’s “design argument” and
the Third Way to Leibniz’s cosmological argument. As I have argued elsewhere,
these are egregious misreadings, and they are only the tip of the iceberg.

For the
Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, then, modern metaphysics, epistemology,
philosophy of religion, etc. are in the same shape that Alasdair MacIntyre
famously argued modern ethics is in. In
the former cases no less than the latter, crucial philosophical notions have
been ripped from the intellectual contexts that gave them their intelligibility
and have become distorted as a result, and the range of theoretical options visible
to the modern philosopher has shrunk drastically. Nagel’s proposals are bound to seem odd and
ill-motivated, not only because they are inchoate, but because fully to work
out their implications would require a far more extensive rethinking of current
orthodoxy than Nagel himself probably realizes.
(That is no doubt one reason why
his ideas are inchoate.) Questions about
PSR, teleology, etc. cannot properly be understood if they are treated as mere
add-ons to a basically naturalistic-cum-scientistic picture of knowledge and
reality, which leave that picture essentially intact. The
picture as a whole needs to be rethought if any part of it is seriously to
be rethought -- just as an understanding of Aristotelian-Scholastic arguments
in philosophy of religion, ethics, etc. require an understanding of general
Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics, philosophy of nature, and epistemology.

Naturalism in contemporary philosophy

This
naturally brings us, finally, to Schliesser’s
remarks on the status of naturalism in contemporary philosophy. Schliesser quotes some of my own comments on
the subject, wherein I note some anti-naturalistic trends in recent philosophy,
and writes:

Now it possible that we live in a philosophical
age of ferment…

Of course, an alternative possibility
is that (analytical) philosophy has relatively low barriers to entry for people
that wish to challenge any naturalistic consensus (we merely need to show some
facility with various baby logics, know how to string arguments together, et
voila). And we shouldn't ignore the fact that from Wittgenstein (and his
students) onward, analytical philosophy has been welcoming to all kinds of
anti-naturalists (so that Feser may just be noting that we are less
naturalistic than talk of "consensus" warrants). For there is nothing
in our collective (disunified) methods or teachings that would
enforce/stabilize a "naturalistic consensus."

End
quote. I don’t think these two possibilities
are incompatible. We could be living in
a time of ferment precisely because
analytic philosophy is of its nature open to anti-naturalist ideas. And one could go back further than
Wittgenstein to find examples -- for instance to Frege’s, or even Russell’s,
Platonism. Even logical positivism and Ayer’s
phenomenalism are closer to idealism than to the realist materialism
characteristic of contemporary naturalism.
The current dominance of materialist naturalism -- and “dominance” is a
better word than “consensus” -- may turn out to be as much of an anomaly in the
history of analytic philosophy as it is in the history of philosophy more
generally.

Of all the blogs that I read... Yours are consistently the longest ones i will ever read. I'm about 2/3rd through it and i will get back to it tomorrow! I requested 3 of your books as Christmas gifts, so can treat them as gifts from a wise man? ;)

Schliesser on Aristotle:His final causes are rooted in the worldly natures of worldly things.

Bzzzt! Wrong. He's got it exactly backwards. Final causes are not rooted in the nature of things; rather the nature of things are rooted in final causes. If A is rooted in B, then A presupposes B. But this would be absurd in the case of final causes; for it would mean that the reason for a thing's existence would presuppose the existence of the thing, which is completely unintelligible. It's like saying a cause depends on its effect.

One of the commentators in that thread accuses you of being "sleazy and disingenuous" because cite Nancy Cartwright as a "Thomist", even though you have repeatedly said that philosophers such as Cartwright would have no truck with your Thomism even though their ideas point in its general direction.

Actually I personally can understand why they think that being an a-theist = begin rational.

I think it has something to do with the concept of emancipation/freedom. A person feels that most people are slaves of their religion so they reject the idea altogether and then look for reasons to make their rejection justifiable. After they found reasons that pleases their needs they just get amazed on how people didn't caught up to that, and that obviously people are not really rational since they don't test their beliefs, which leads the person to conclude that HE is rational especially because he got rid of the greatest scam in society (religion), and now they find themselves free at least in their minds, while others are just ideological zombies going with the flow.So people seek new ways to guide themselves, some people join some militant group to fight for the greater good, others join skeptic sites to be part of a select group free and critical thinkers, others go Carpe Diem until they die, others join philosophy sites, other joins science sites; but very few go all the way to the end of the rabbit hole and try doubting their cherished beliefs and analyse what other people have to offer and what they have to offer.After all the idea was never to doubt everything but just to justify their disbelief, hence the pathological behavior, they don't wanna be slaves of religion ever again so they are ready to go high and low to avoid that.

Kant, rather than rejecting the rationalist and empiricist extremes and returning to the Aristotelian middle ground position -- mind-independent necessity, knowledge of which is grounded in experience -- for all practical purposes embraced the anti-Aristotelian aspects of both rationalism and empiricism and chucked out the remaining Aristotelian bits of each: Conceptual truths reflect no mind-independent necessity (at least as far as we can possibly know) and are not grounded in experience but are a priori.

Oh, wow.

Okay, I'm a regular reader just de-lurking to say that I tried to explain the above criticism of Kant to a philosophy professor I had once. Or something close to that.

But I was an amateur (still am, really). The professor didn't really buy, and finally I just gave up. Now I'm kicking myself. But thank you, Dr. Feser, for crystallizing for me the problems I had with Kant's epistemology.

I am delighted to hear of your forthcoming ‘Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought’. I trust you’ll let us know through this blog when the relevant issue of the ACPQ appears. I suspect it will have a strong bearing on my own chief (amateur) philosophical pursuit, which has to do with reinterpreting semiotic constructs and so-called ‘emergent properties’ in terms of a model conceptually similar to the OSI networking model. If that sounds like gobbledygook, it probably is; but I have a strong intuition that there is an interesting discovery to be made in that area, and I haven’t been able to find that anyone has yet made it.

Meanwhile, I recently finished reading your Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, and found it helpful and rewarding, but alas, all too brief and cursory. I wonder if you could recommend a good book that would help the autodidact bridge the gap between your Aquinas and the level of knowledge required to digest the Summa Theologiae directly. I ask here, rather than by email, because I know you are extremely busy and others of your blog readers may be interested in your answer.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.